As someone who went to a good school in the middle of nowhere, where rent was cheap and we were surrounded by farmland for 50 miles in every direction, I wonder if that's not the more sustainable way to do it.
Like computer science, having a college in a town doesn't require a lot from its location. It doesn't need to be near a river, oil or mineral deposits, etc. People travel there all the time to simply be there.
Going to college in an already large city, many of which have housing affordability problems already, seems to compound the issue. They aren't making any more land for housing near UCLA.
While it can be nice to have lots of cultural and interesting things to do in the town where you go to school, I'm not sure it's really required.
I wonder if this means that schools in smaller "college towns" will be more appealing... although it seems like reputation is everything, and everyone still wants to go to an expensive school thinking it will make a difference in their life, as opposed to getting a similar education with less name recognition, as shown by the article:
> “But I clicked ‘accept’ on my admission anyway,” she says, figuring that attending UT Austin’s lauded journalism school would lead to more internship opportunities and, ultimately, a job after she graduated.
Although maybe this is all just naive thinking. Perhaps this would just end up with the system con-ing them somewhere else. We always find a reason and a way to extract more money from students.